Wednesday, May 23, 2018

I
was sorry to hear of the death of Philip Roth this week.I have been reading his work ever since his
collection of stories, Goodbye, Columbus,won the National Book Award in 1959 when I
was a senior in high school. I have particularly enjoyed his creation of Nathan
Zuckerman throughout the years. However, my favorite Roth book is Portnoy’s Complaint, a book that,
indirectly, almost got me fired from my university teaching job. It was Portnoy’s Complaint that inspired me to
create a course in the English Department years ago entitled Love and Sex in Literature.In my course proposal, I argued that novels
like Portnoy’s Complaint were works
of art that had to be taken seriously, but that because readers were so
unaccustomed to reading graphic descriptions of sexuality outside of
pornography they lacked any historical/critical context for taking sex
seriously in literature. I wanted to create
a course that would “teach” students how to read about sex intelligently.

After
teaching the course for a year, one of my colleagues challenged the validity of
the course and my authority to teach it—resulting in a charge of unprofessional
conduct that lead to an “investigation” by administrators and fellow
faculty.However, by this time, I had
made a respected name for myself as an expert in the study of sexual fantasy in
literature and had delivered scholarly papers at a number of professional
societies and had published several academic research articles on the
subject.My colleagues found the course
to have academic validity and found me “qualified” to teach it. It was an
interesting period in my career, and I thank Philip Roth for indirectly
encouraging me to engage in it. Consequently, today, although it means a
momentary departure from my usual discussions of the short story, I pay tribute
to Philip Roth by making some comments about one of his most famous novels—Portnoy’s Complaint.

Portnoy’s Complaint
depicts one long quest in which Portnoy uses sexuality as a weapon to rebel
against repression, even as he is victimized by sexuality itself.Caught by what Freud calls "The Most
Prevalent Form of Degradation in Erotic Life," Portnoy cannot unite the
two currents of feeling--the affectionate with the sensuous.Only when the sexual partner is degraded can
he freely feel his sensual feelings--which explains his preoccupation with, and
his ultimate rejection of gentile women.When he meets Monkey, who seems the complete embodiment of his
adolescent sexual fantasies, he ridicules and humiliates her until he drives
her away, for he can neither accept her as a real woman nor be satisfied with
her as a sexual fantasy.

Throughout
the novel, Portnoy recounts his obsessive masturbation, his constant
preoccupation with a pornographic fantasy object he calls Thereal McCoy, and
his unsuccessful romantic and sexual experiences with various gentile women.
However, he also spends equally as much of his confessional monologue to his
complaints against the repressions placed on him by his parents and his Jewish
culture in general--which primarily amounts to the constant message that
"life is boundaries and restrictions if it's anything, hundreds of
thousands of little rules laid down by none other than None Other."
Finally, when he goes to Israel on a sort of pilgrimage to atone for his transgressions
and to come to terms with his cultural roots,he meets and tries to have sex with a Jewish woman, only to find he is
impotent with her.The novel ends with
Portnoy's drawn-out howl at what he calls the disproportion of the guilt he
feels, followed by a "punch line"--Dr. Spielvogel's only words in the
novel--"Now vee may perhaps to begin Yes?"

In
a sense, the entire novel is Portnoy's character, for he not only is its
central and entirely dominatingfigure,
he is its only narrator as well.Because
of his Jewish childhood, particularly his desire to please his mother, Portnoy
says at one point that his occupation is being "good." He wants to be
a good little boy, but he cannot control the demands of his own physical body
as a child, and thus suffers disproportionate guilt for his masturbation and
for his adolescent sexual fantasies about every female he meets.

Portnoy is the living embodiment of what Freud
defines as "civilization and its discontents"--a walking
personification of the Oedipus complex.Moreover, he is representative of what many refer to as the
"self-hating" Jew, which is what the Jewish woman Naomi calls him in
the novel's final section.He presents
himself throughout as both the teller of and the butt of an extended Jewish
joke.He is intelligent enough to know
himself well, to know who and what he is, but he is not strong enough to free
himself from his dilemma of being torn between his desire to be
"good" and his obsessive sexual desires.

Portnoy's
mother and father, Sophie and Jack, are less real people than they are
stereotypes of the Jewish mother and father in America, with Sophie complaining
to her friends that she is "too good," and warning Portnoy about
eating gentile junk food, and Jack complaining about his constant constipation,
both literally and metaphorically. Portnoy sees them both as the greatest
packagers of guilt in society.Having
read Freud, Portnoy sees the Jewish woman, Naomi, whom he unsuccessfully tries
to have sex with, as a mother-substitute, and cries out to Doctor Spielvogel,
"This then is the culmination of the Oedipal drama, Doctor?More farce, my friend!Too much to swallow, I'm afraid Oedipus Rex is a famous tragedy,
schmuck, not another joke!" Although Portnoy wishes he could have
nourished himself on his father's vulgarity instead of always searching for his
mother's approval, even that vulgarity has become a source of
shame--"every place I turn something else to be ashamed of."

The
Monkey also is less a real character than she is the embodiment of Portnoy's
adolescent fantasy of the sexual woman, the "star of all those
pornographic films" he produces in his own head. Uneducated hillbilly
turned high-fashion model, she is an aggressively sexual creature instead of
the reluctant puritan gentile women he has known before.Although she has her own needs, Portnoy can
focus on the needs of no one but himself. Kay Campbell (Pumpkin), Portnoy's
girlfriend at Antioch College, represents his yearning for Protestant middle American
values, while Sarah Abbott Maulsby (Pilgrim) embodies New England respectability.However, as Portnoy himself recognizes, he
does not want these women so much as he wants what they represent.

The
most basic thematic interest in the novel centers on the Freudian tension
between human desires for controlled civilized behavior and the discontent that
results from having to give upimpulsive
behavior to establish civilization. Portnoy is the extreme embodiment of modern
man self-consciously caught in this war between necessary control and desired
freedom. However, such a theme sounds much too academic for the means by which
Roth's novel embodies it.For the novel,
serious as its theme is, is one of the great comic masterpieces of American literature.

It
is hard to take seriously the Portnoy voice agonizing about locking himself in
the bathroom to engage in masturbation while his mother stands outside asking
him not to flush so she can examine his stool. Portnoy describes his penis as
his "battering ram to freedom," and cries out, "LET'S PUT THE ID
BACK IN YID. Liberate this nice Jewish boy's libido, will you please?"
However, although Portnoy longs for the uninhibited sexual attitude of his
boyhood classmate, Smolka, at the same time, he asks, "How would I like my
underwear all gray and jumbled up in my drawer, as Smolka's always is?"

What
Portnoy cannot tolerate is the fact that he cannot have both his toll house
cookies and milk which his mother supplies, as well as the sexual experiences
that Smolka enjoys. Since sexuality is the central taboo impulse which civilization
seeks to control to assure its own stability, the nature of sexuality itself is
a primary theme of the novel."What
a mysterious business it is," says Portnoy, "with sex the human
imagination runs to Z, and then beyond."Because sexuality itself is so inextricably bound up with fantasy, the
very style and tone of the book combines the realism of Portnoy's experience
with the surrealism of his sexual fantasies.

The fact that Portnoy is Jewish is less important in its own right than
it is to embody the extreme insistence on "self-control, sobriety,
sanctions" which society says is the "key to human life."The non-Jewish society which Portnoy often
yearns for is no less banal and crippled in its restrictions and recriminations
than the values which his Jewish heritage attempts to instill. Thus, the
primary themes of the book are both psychological and social, but the medium
for both is the hilarious self-satirizing voice of Portnoy, which is alternately
sophomoric in its humor and sharply critical of social absurdity.

Portnoy's Complaint
is somewhat of a cultural milestone in fiction of the 1960's, for, although its
obsessive focus on sexuality and its constant use of taboo words seemed to
align it with many of the conventions associated with pornography, it was a
serious novel with a serious theme. Consequently,
its publication forced many cultural critics to reevaluate their previous
assumptions about sexually-explicit literature.It was hailed by many reviewers, made the best-seller list, and became a
topic of cocktail-party conversation in an era in which "pop porno"
became acceptable. Not since the works of Henry Miller had autobiographical
fiction and explicit sexuality been so forthright and engaging.

Although
much of the criticism of the book has focused on its Jewishness, many have
recognized it as typically American as Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn (1884) and J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye (1951)--as a comic masterpiece of the cultural
and personal conflicts of growing up in American society.

Tuesday, May 15, 2018

I am reading stories in this year’s Best
American Short Stories randomly.They are fun, but rather lightweight.It’s not often that BASS is a
book you can take to the beach and read without worrying about being
distracted.But these stories don’t take
much concentration. Here are some comments on the first five. Maybe the next
five will be more challenging.

T. C. Boyle, “Are We Not Men?”

T. C. Boyle is the consummate professional writer, always on the
lookout for subjects that might “make a story,” and that’s what he is good at—“making
stories.”The subject of “Are We Not
Men?” as he makes clear in his “contributors’ notes” to the 2017 Best American Short Stories, is
gene-editing technology.The title is
from H. G. Well’s The Island of Doctor
Moreau, which is about a doctor who experiments with combining animal
species, often with humans, resulting in such creatures as hyena-swine,
dog-man, leopard-man, etc. In this story, Boyle gives us “crowparrots” and “micropigs”
and explores lightly the human use of CRISPR technology which allows the main
character and his wife to choose from a menu how their chromosomes can be matched
up to create a daughter.The story
reminds us that Boyle is primarily a satirist, not a short story writer--an
entertainer, not a powerful artist.

Danielle Evans, “Richard of York
Gave Battle in Vain”

The title is an acronym for the
colors that make up a rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet.
Evans says the first thread of the story came from hearing a sermon on Noah’s
Ark, which perhaps lead to the first sentence of the story; “Two by two the
animals boarded, and then all of the rest of them in the world died, but no one
ever tells the story that way.” The rainbow, of course, is a sign of God’s
promise never to destroy the earth again with water—which the narrator says
seems like a “hell of a caveat.” The story centers on the wedding of Dori, a
pastor’s daughter, who has her bridesmaids wear the seven colors of the rainbow.
Evans says the real loneliness of the story lies underneath the opening
sentences—understanding that “every triumphant story of the things we survive
is also the story of the losses haunting it.” However, the reader has to wade
through lots and lots of plot stuff to get to this payoff—involving Rena and JT
detained in a small hotel in Africa because of the threat of a biological
warfare agent, Rena’s sister Elizabeth being shot by her husband because her
suspected infidelity, JT disappearing when he was supposed to be marrying Dori,
Dori and Rena searching for JT and ending up at a water park, etc. etc.It is a cluttered story that tries my
patience.

Sonya Larson, “Gabe Dove”

Sonya Larson’s “Contributors’ Notes” about this story seem to me more
intriguing than the story itself.She
recalls a period a few years earlier when she found herself suddenly single;
trying to date again, she discovered that many men were most interested in her
race, which is half Asian.It occurred
to her that the dating world may be one of the last remaining realms in which
people openly expressed racial preference. Larson says that although we tend to
think that attraction is a mysterious, deeply personal force, we often find
that forces of history, stereotyping, even public policy may shape what we
think is simply personal.She wondered
if what we think is our gut feelings may have a racial bias.So she set out to write a story that “houses”
these ideas—resonating like a bell tower around a bell.She concludes that although “Gabe Dove” may
seem like a simple dating story, what is actually at stake is “nothing less
than who we make available to ourselves to love.”Sounds like complex stuff, but I amnot sure the story can carry this much
weight.

Fionel Mazel, “Let’s Go to the
Videotape”

And here’s another story whose originating idea seems more complex than
the story itself.Mazel says the story
arose from her thinking about the influence of social media on children because
rather than worrying about its detrimental effects, she thought social media
was very helpful, finding herself in a community whose shared interest was
parenting, but then finding herself uncomfortable with feeling this way. She
asked the following questions: Is camaraderie necessarily fake simply because
you don’t know the people you are exchanging ideas with?Does publicizing personal details mean the
end of real friendship?She said the
story arose from her desire to find a framework for thinking through how all
this stuff might play out in the life of a man “hobbled by grief.” The result—a
story about a man who enters a video in America’s
Funniest Home Videos of his son being thrown over the handlebars while
learning to ride a bike--seems less about a complex human issue than it is an
opportunity for Maazel to create some funny scenes and dialogue.

Jess Walter, “Famous Actor”

I posted an essay on Jess Walter’s short story collection We Live in Water´ when it first came out.
My conclusion then was as follows:

Jess
Walter is a professional writer, a guy who makes much of his living
writing—first as a journalist and now as a fiction writer, who has cranked out
a political mystery novel, a 9/11 suspense novel, a social satire, and a movie
romance epic, and this collection of popular, entertaining, but certainly not
literary, short stories.If Jess Walter
signifies the “modern American moment,” then the moment is about fiction that
pleasantly passes the time but does not significantly stimulate the grey
matter.Just the kind of
disposable stories your Kindle was made for.

My
opinion of his story “Famous Actor” in the 2017 Best American Short Stories is pretty much the same.Walter is clever, with lines like: “First sex
is like being in a stranger’s kitchen, trying all the drawers, looking for a
spoon.”He invented a “famous actor”
because he wanted to write a story about a romantic encounter with a famous
actor, adding that he can tell if a story is going to work if he is having fun
writing it. Indeed Walter does seem to have fun inventing story lines for the
movies and tv shows the famous actor has made. The result is entertaining, but that’s all. Is
that enough?

Saturday, May 12, 2018

Several stories in this year’s O.
Henry Prize Stories raise for me the issue of the difference between the
pleasure we get from reading novels vs. the pleasure we get from reading short
stories—an issue which may be related to the question of plot vs. form or
reality vs. artifice.

The author of four novels, Michelle Huneven calls herself a “novelist
by nature” a designation she does not define, although she says she had to
“prune” some “virulent digressions” from “Too Good to Be True” resulting from
her “novelistic nature.” Laura Furman, the editor of the O. Henry collections, who chooses all the stories included each
year, says Huneven’s story exhibits the writer’s skill to permit the “reader to
ride on the narrative current without noticing form or technique”-- a novelistic
characteristic that is often more focused on reflecting the so-called “real
world,” rather than creating a formal world of thematic significance.

David Bradley, the author of two novels, chose “Too Good to Be True” as
his favorite story in this year’s O.
Henry Prize Stories, admitting that
he has always loved the “long, not the short” of a story and that as a teacher
of creative writing, he struggled to conceal this prejudice from this students.
He says that while he teaches Poe’s insistence that no word should be written
that does not contribute to the story’s one pre-established design, he has
always found undue length less exceptionable than undue brevity. Bradley says he has never thought a tale “more
elegant just because I could read it between or during bathroom breaks.” He
says that what he wants while sitting by a roaring fire with a glass of bourbon
and a book was an “old-fashioned story, a la Chaucer, Rabelais, or Balzac, with
a beginning, middle, and ending.” Huneven’s story was his favorite because it kept him sitting longer than he wanted and
haunted him even after his glass was
empty and the fire was out. That all sounds very “novelistic by nature” to me.

So I asked myself, one again as I have for lo these many years: What is
“novelistic” and what is “short storyistic” by nature—willing to accept all the
while that a novel can have short story characteristics and a short story can
have novelistic characteristics. If I ask myself what “Too Good to Be True” is about, I would say it is about a young woman who is a drug addict and her family’s pain at their inability to help her escape that habit. The story is novelistic rather than short storyistic because it does not “mean” anything; it is rather "about" "as if" real characters in the real world.

Here are some other stories that I would
characteristic as “novelistic” rather than “short storyistic” in the 2017 O. Henry Prize Stories:

Genevieve Plunkett, “Something for a Young Woman”

There is something of a mystery in this story of a young woman who
works for a shop owner who gives her a necklace. She marries someone else,
wants to play the viola in a symphony, has a baby, separates from her husband,
is drawn back to the shop owner, but makes no contact with him, wears the
necklace to his funeral, and cannot make up her mind about returning to her
husband. This could go on and on, much
as a novel can go on and on—never coming to a thematically meaningful ending.

Mary LaChapelle, “Floating Garden”

A young boy and his mother escape from an unnamed country in
conflict. He becomes separated from his
mother, but continuing on his own, boards a ship and ends up in Oakland. He is
taken in by a woman who raises him and goes to a Southern California college on
a scholarship. This is a straightforward journey story, told in first person,
and could have been a novel had the details of his escape and his new life in America been more elaborated
detailed. But it has no thematic meaning
other than the “as if” real events in the boy’s escape.

Keith Eisner, “Blue Dot”

Although this story begins in fairy tale fashion with “Once upon a
time,” it is actually a realistic story about young people hanging out and
taking drugs. They talk a lot, but not about anything of thematic significance.

Lesley Nneka Arimah, “Glory”

This story is from Arimah’s What
It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky, a debut collection that received
good reviews and stirred up some publicity. It is a story about a young Nigerian
woman whose parents named her “Glorybetogod.” But she seems to have come into
the world resenting it. When she meets a young man, who seems to have been born
lucky, her parents think Glory’s fortunes have changed--that her life will
“coalesce into an intricate puzzle.” However, when the young man offers her a
ring, she knows she must make a decision. She could go on and on having
encounters like this, chapter after chapter.

Manuel Munoz, “The Reason is Because”

Munoz says in the comments at the end of the O. Henry Awards that the character in his story named Nela, who
gets pregnant and drops out of school, reminds him of girls he grew up with. He
says he does not see characters like Nela in American fiction often and that
the story was a way for him to deal with what has been a long standing problem
in his fiction—“how to name the violence that shapes the people I write
about—the people I love—without veering into stereotype.”

Wednesday, May 9, 2018

A few years ago, I did a series of blogs on the six shortlisted
collections for the 2012 Frank O’Connor. Kevin
Barry’s collection Dark Lies the Island, was my favorite of the six
shortlisted books, but I quickly admitted that it was my favorite for personal
reasons, not necessarily for critical reasons.

I enjoyed Barry’s Dark Lies the Island
because:

*I have lived in Ireland and love the people.

*My wife, whom I love best of all people, is
Irish.

*I love Jameson, Bushmills, and Guinness.

I also liked Barry’s story “A Cruelty.” I
found the story simple and irresistible.
You know from the very first sentence that the story is about the power of
obsession: “He climbs the twenty-three steps of the metal traverse bridge at
9:25 a.m., and not an instant before.”After a page and a half of obsessive observation, we get the background
of the main character Donie, who was first allowed to make the short train
journey from Boyle to Sligo on his sixteenth birthday.He has now made the run every working day for
twenty years, and it is his belief that if he is not on the 9:33 train, the
9:33 will not run.The ritual is his way
of controlling his limited life; he experiences a 100 percent day when
everything falls into place just as it should.

But of course, as is the nature of a short
story, this is an account of a day when things do not go on in the smooth
ritualistic way that Donie thinks they should, for as he eats his usual
sandwiches on his usual bench, a man appears who manifests an inexplicable
cruelty—calling him a “poor dumb cunt” and saying that it looks as though the best part of Donie “dribbled down the
father’s leg.”The man reminds Donie of
a picture of a hyena he once saw in a coloring book, and the image haunts him
even after he escapes.The day is
spoiled, of course, and it is not clear if Donie will ever feel at home in the
world again.It is his first encounter
with motiveless malignancy—there is no accounting for it. All he can do is go
home and retreat into the arms of his mother.

I remember once when I was in a department
store with my daughter, a sweet trusting child of two or three. A woman stood close by looking
at clothes with her son, also about the age of two or three.When my daughter reached out to greet him, he
suddenly pushed her away with a frown. I have never forgotten her face as she looked up at me for an
explanation. I had none.

Heather Monley, “Paddle to Canada”

This is another simple story about a family who, while on holiday, get
caught in a thunderstorm while paddle boating on a lake.Heather Monley says the story originated from
a memory of when she was four or five and her family were similarly caught in a
storm. However, the event is not the story, but rather it serves as the center
of a story about telling stories, for the fictional family members never forget
the event and often laugh about it. When the father goes back to the boat
rental to get his driver’s license, the owner challenges his failure to make a
deposit. The father laughs at the idea that the rental required a deposit: “What
do they think we’re going to do?Paddle
to Canada?”

But later the story becomes a point of contention after the parents get
a divorce.The mother uses it as an
example of the father’s carelessness and selfish stinginess.The father uses it as an example of the
mother’s ineptitude, hysterically shrieking and being no help on the
paddleboat.The children’s memories of
the event become “muddled with what they had been told , and what they wanted
to believe.”

In her comments on the story, Heather Monley says it is about the
nature of stories, a subject she finds herself returning to often.“I like stories that question themselves,”
she says, stories that “point out the tenuous connection between narrative and
truth.”For the children the event becomes
an occasion for trying to understand-- “as if thinking hard enough or in the
right combination would lead somewhere, would form a pathway to a world that
had been lost in the confusion of their lives.” This is a thematically tight
story. The peril in the boat, the fear, and then the joy of surviving, and telling
the story over and over creates a kind of bond between the family--that is,
until the divorce, and the two children get different sides of the parents
blaming each other. A broken family is a complex experience for children.
Heather Monley has found a story way of dealing with that complexity.

Saturday, May 5, 2018

Shruti Swamy says that her story
“Night Garden-- about a woman who watches her dog stare down a cobra and drive
it away--told itself to her very simply and she wrote it down, noting that
every once in a while “a miracle happens, and a story is started and finished
in the space of an evening.” She says this has only truly happened to herr once,
adding “ it is the sweetest feeling I know.”

The discovery of a story to tell is partially that which grabs the
artist and makes him or her need to tell it; it is something thatinvolves him with the nature of its latent significance
that is compelling. Sherwood Anderson once said, “having, from a conversation
overheard or in some other way, got the tone of a tale, I was like a woman who
has just become impregnated.Something
was growing inside me.At night when I
lay in my bed I could feel the heels of the tale kicking against the walls of
my body."This involvement of the
teller with the tale, this need to give it life and form, says Anderson, grows
out of the materials of the tale and the teller's relation to them."It was the tale trying to take form
that kicked about inside the tale-teller at night when he wanted to
sleep."

Katherine Anne Porter once said her stories spring from a tiny seed and
that she always writes a story in one sitting, "one single burst of
energy."Sometimes the story is so
unified around this central impulse or tone it seems that the writer must have
written in one go.Critic T.W. Higginson
said of De Maupassant's stories that they seem to have been done in one
sitting, "so complete is the grasp, the single grasp, upon the
mind."And William Carlos Williams
has said that the short story consists of one "single flight of the
imagination, complete:up and
down."

Hemingway once said that he wrote "The Killers" and "Ten
Indians" in one day, and Franz Kafka supposedly wrote the
"Judgment" in one night. This is not to say that the story that the
author ultimately published and that we read is what was written in one
sitting—but rather that the story was completed in its wholeness in one burst
of dominating impulse, one single flight of the imagination or involvement.
This suggests something about the short story that does not hold true for the
novel—that the form springs from a writer involvement in the story that
corresponds in some ways to the lyrical impulse of the poet.

Elizabeth Bowen has said that the "first necessity for the short
story, at the set out, is necessariness.The story, that is to say, must spring from an impression or perception
pressing enough, acute enough, to have made the writer write... The story
should have the valid central emotion and inner spontaneity of the lyric; it
should magnetize the imagination and give pleasure--of however disturbing,
painful or complex a kind.” Bowen also argued that the story should be as
composed, in the plastic sense, and as visual as a picture.

Shruti Swamy’s “Night Garden” is indeed a picture, but it is also a
story about a woman’s creation of that picture—her fascination by a form manifested in the world outside her
window that stands for something mysterious; the story charts her efforts to
understand the significance of that spatial form, which draws her in and makes
her part of the form she observes.

Although she first is drawn to the shape the dog makes, his tail taunt
and his head level with his spine, “so his body arrowed into a straight line,
nearly gleaming with a quality of attention,” the snake also catches her
attention, for there seems something “too perfect about her movements, which
were curving and graceful. Half in love with both, I thought, and it chilled
me.”As night falls, the two animals
look like “unearthly, gods who had taken the form of animals for cosmic
battle.”

The story ends with the dog winning the frozen battle with the cobra
and the woman carrying her exhausted pet into the house.

O. Henry Prize Story editor Laura Furman suggests that there is more at
stake for the narrator than her dog’s life, for in watching the silent
confrontation she’s “bearing witness as well to the failure of her marriage and
the question of how she will face the rest of her life.”However, I see nothing in the story to
suggest this personal backstory, except perhaps the narrator’s general
statement that “everyone’s marriage is unknowable from the outside.”

There is nothing personal about this story; it is the creation of a
form in space, a picture that means something, which only the
picture itself can embody.

Thursday, May 3, 2018

I wrote about this story when it first appeared in the New Yorker.Here are some of my remarks:

In McFarlane's story, the central characters are a school teacher named
Miss Lewis, a student favorite named Joseph, and the twenty-one other students
in her class. On the day of the story, the kids want to play
"buttony."They form a circle,
hold out their hands, and close their eyes, while Joseph, who has been sent in
to get a button from Miss Lewis's desk drawer, walks around the circle and
touches each pair of hands, saying at the same time "buttony."After he goes to all twenty-one students,
they are told to close their hands and open their eyes; each student is given
the chance to guess who's got the button. The one who has been holding the
button—not the one who guesses correctly-- gets to "hide" it the next
time.

On this particular day that the children play the game, something
different happens—as it must, or else there would be no story: When Joseph gets
the button on a subsequent round of the game, he walks around the circle but
does not hide the button in anyone's hand, but rather puts it in his
mouth.Only Miss Lewis has her eyes open
to see this action. When the children guess everyone and still cannot find the
button, they begin to kick and shout and rebel against Miss Lewis—opening her
hands, looking up her skirt, and pulling the pins from her hair to look for the
button.

In her interview with Deborah Treisman, McFarlane says as the wrote the
story she was interested in the "strange ritualistic way in which the game
plays out so many childhood fears—of rejection, of being overlooked or lied to
or tricked."

And indeed, if you put yourself in the game, you can imagine its
potential for significance. The twenty-one kids have their eyes closed and thus
live in darkness during the game's duration.They hold out their hands in supplication, waiting for an undeserved
gift, something to be presented to them by a powerful giver, waiting to be
chosen—feeling the disappointment of the giver touching their hands but putting
nothing in it, and then the joy of feeling the button in the palm.

And when it is time to guess who has the button, all you really know is
that you do not have it.As in a
combination of poker-face and counting cards, the players watch the faces of
the rest of the players to see if they give themselves away and try to keep
track of all those who have played their hand by saying they do not have the
button.

Farlane's point is that the game, as it is played in her story, is not
merely a child's game, but something more powerfully latent with meaning.

The key line, one that McFarlane cannot resist using, is: "They
were like children in a fairy tale, under a spell." And yes, the story has
all the elements of a fairy tale—a hero with special powers, an adult who is
somehow mysteriously guilt and must be punished, a ritual or ceremony, a magic
object, children spellbound, a secret, a trick, a childhood rebellion against
the adult, and a last-minute rescue.

"Buttony" creates the kind of seemingly trivial, yet
ultimately magical encounter with alternate reality that the short story has
always done so well. And as usual, it has something to do with the tension
between the sacred and the profane—between the spiritual and the trivial—between
innocence and experience.

McFarlane handles these traditional short story elements quite well in choice
of detail and in storytelling syntax. For example, "All the children
handled the button with reverence, but none more than Joseph. He was gifted in
solemnity. He had a processional walk and moved his head slowly when his name
was called—and it was regularly called."

We know that something must be at stake for one character, and we know
it is Miss Lewis, for the story is told from her perspective, and it is she who
is "responsible." McFarlane tells us:"Miss Lewis wanted her children to live in a heightened way, and
she encouraged this sort of ceremony."

So it is really no surprise that Miss Lewis is the one who is attacked
at the end of the story, for even though the button is secretly hidden in
Joseph's mouth, it is she, the children suspect, who has the button. Children
always know there is a secret, and who else must have it except the adult, the
teacher?

When one child looks up under her dress, as if there is where the
secret must lie, and another tears through her hair, as though it must somehow
be in her head, Miss Lewis cries out and sees one of the other teachers running
toward her with Joseph behind him, "not quite running, not altogether, but
like a shadow, long and blank and beautiful." For Joseph is not so much
real as he is a supernatural or spiritual embodiment of forces that we suspect
lie around us, but that we can never really verify.We don't know what they are, but we know they
mean something.

At the end of her interview with Deborah Treisman, McFarlane says:
"Most of all, I'm drawn to those moments when people do things that are
mysterious even to themselves."

McFarlane could not come up with a better characterization of the short
story form than that.

Tuesday, May 1, 2018

I feel guilty for neglecting my blog for the past several months.I can only plead a variety of the usual
reasons: other work commitments, family responsibilities and pleasures, a few
health issues common to my age, etc. etc.But now that it is May 1, the beginning of Short Story Month--a
celebration that has never really caught on with writers or readers, but one to
which I feel bound to contribute—I will try to compensate for my neglect by
taking another look at the stories in the two collections that I have always
read and commented on in the past—the 2017 issues of The O. Henry Prize Stories and The
Best American Short Stories. I will comment on as many stories from the two
collections as I have time for this month—focusing on those that I thought were
the best of the best and also commenting on those that did not engage me--trying
to explain the reasons for my responses. The first is:

I like this story about a young graduate student who lives with an old
retired professor. Instead of the old man telling the young student a story, as
we might expect, the student tells the teacher a story--about a boy whose
family has a lion for a pet until it grows too powerful and has to be released
back into the wild.

As we often expect from a story within a story, there seems to be a
parallel--between the student’s relationship with the old man and the boy’s relationship
with the lion. I have been thinking about the story this week as my wife and I
take our 3-year-old grandson to his preschool in the morning.He often wants to hear a recording of Peter,
Paul, and Mary singing “Puff the Magic Dragon,” and he wants to hear it repeated
over and over again; it is a great pleasure to watch him in the rear view
mirror, nodding in time and singing along. As I sit here and read and reread “Lion,”
I am reminded how important it is to hear a rhythmic pattern repeated over and
over—a chant, a prayer, a mantra, a poem, a short story—until the pattern seems
to get synchronized with your mind—pulling loose things inside of you together
and becoming magically meaningful.

In his comments on the story at the end the O. Henry collection, Wil
Weitzel says hewrote the first version
of the story fast because he did not want to think too hard about it or get
tripped up by the words—as if it was the rhythm of the story rather than the
individual words that mattered.When he
worked on the revision, he said the tried to add logic and clarity, but it did
not seem right, so he gave up trying to rationalize the story.

The result is a story that works the way short stories—especially very
short short stories—often work—by transforming the characters and events into
emblems of something that transcends the everyday.When the story begins, the old man has died
and the young man bathes him and prepares him for burial--completing the
process that had already begun when he began to live with him. The old
professor seems “as old as old trees, their bark haggard and worn.”I know that image.Once, I paid a visit to an old writer/teacher,
who had a powerful influence on me when I was young.He lay in a hospital bed, and I placed my
hand on his—a hand that was supple and translucent, as if he had already begun
the process of being transformed from mere flesh into spirit or monument, or
relic, or manuscript. He died two days
later.I did what all students try to
do: I wrote about it, and the tribute
appeared in a Kentucky journal called Appalachian
Heritage.And this is what Wil
Weitzel does in “Lion”—trying to work his way through to the significance of a
young man’s search for the lion, trying to tell the story.

Tenth Anniversary of My Blog

Friday, Nov. 16, is the tenth anniversary of my blog. I have been taking some time off because I have been working on a new book on the short story. I have submitted a proposal to a publisher and am waiting for a reply. I will let you know when I hear from them. Thank you for continuing to read essays in my archives.

Now Available from Amazon in paperback and Kindle

Click cover to go to Amazon and read the Introduction and first chapter.

Dubliners Centenial

One hundred years ago, the great collection of stories Dubliners by James Joyce appeared. If you are interested in my comments on that collection, see my posts in April 2012 when the book was featured in Dublin's "One City, One Book."